I Remember Web: Streaming Video

 This was a series I was trying to start up something back when I was trying to post on Reddit more often.  As the political censorship ramped up during the 2016 election I was actively trying to maintain an account for my actual personal writings there.  I was posting to writing prompts by grabbing a few prompts here and there and seeing if I could doodle a few words into a short story.  Naturally that meant an account not linked to my main.  I'm not sure if I should have bothered.  At some point or another the small subreddit I was working on got deleted and at some point or another that account shadowbanned.  I never bothered to reinstate it.

 This series was called 'I remember Web' and was based in part on the articles I remembered reading from a magazine my Grandmother used to subscribe to, called Reminisce Magazine.  The articles were all made up of reader submissions and told of times past and ended always with the words: I remember, I was there.  This was my attempt to create something like it for the earlier days of the web, hence the name.

Some time later I discovered that a few of those old prompts had been saved to my email from when I originally worked on them.  I plan to share those here....

I Remember Web: Streaming Video

 

Back in the early days of the Web there really wasn't video, I don't mean not like it is today--I mean not at all.  The closest thing many of us had back then were animated GIFs which due to the slow download speeds of the day often took ages to load even on faster connections and we would watch the whole sequence in slow motion until it finished downloading in the cache and suddenly sped up indicating the whole file was now available. Another popular alternative were flash and shockwave animations which worked much better and spawned entire sites dedicated to them. Newgrounds is an entire post in itself so we won't go into that right now.

Sometimes people would post "small" QuickTime files and MPEG videos which would take a long time to download only to produce tiny videos with muddy or pixelated images.  These were the days when music on the internet was still measured in MIDI files for most people and only few people had heard of XM or MOD files; MPEG2 was just starting to become something people were aware of and MP3 was just a misty haze on the horizon.  I had an Iomega Drive on my PC, one of the early ones using a SCSI card to interface with and it came with the ability to rip the audio from CDs and compress them with Mpeg2, allowing for multiple CDs to have their entire content on the Iomega disk. That was a big deal, so you start to see where we were.

A company started making some headway with video encoded specifically for streaming.  Maybe you've heard of the Vivoactive Player?  It wasn't really great but it was doing to video what another company known as Real was doing to Audio.  Somehow or another a deal was struck and Vivoactive was bought out by or merged with Real to create Real Networks and the Real Video format played by something called The RealPlayer G2.  It changed the internet.

Vivo's compressed video and Real's compressed audio made for an almost unbeatable combination.  So what happened?  They got in the way of a 500 LBS gorilla known as Microsoft.

Possibly you won't miss RealVideo or RealPlayer but it was one of the first software items I bought over the internet and it has a special place in my heart as a result. I remember Web, I remember it because I was there.